I expected more from Property.com
Jun 19th, 2009 by Richard
At one of the sessions at TRAFFIC New York 2008, Brad Geisen and Rick Schwartz talked about the sale of Property.com and how it was a perfect fit. If you missed the announcement, please read Rick’s press release.
I’ve got to admit that the sale to Foreclosure.com sounded like a perfect fit. I was looking forward to seeing Property.com turn into a super-charged version of Foreclosure.com
Geisen said this about the acquisition of Property.com:
I’m going after the 98 percent of the real estate market outside of the foreclosure business.
Sorry Brad, you’re not going to get anything close to 98 percent with the current site!
Fast forward eight months
TRAFFIC NYC was in October 2008, and here we are in June 2009.
Geisen also revealed the new Property.com will be unveiled sometime in 2009.
I’m not sure if the current version of Property.com is the “new” one but the site looks like 12,000 parked pages to me. 
I think the boys can do a much better, and here’s how.
Site Strucuture
The site structure is a train wreck. There are several changes that could make things much more SE friendly and SEO’d. This would lead to higher ranking in the SE’s and more visitors, of course.
1. Property.com has a duplicate content problem that will always hold the site back from ranking. Both www.property.com and property.com resolve to the same content. Just do a 301 redirect of property.com to www.property.com and the problem is solved forever.
2. The category slugs could be much more SE friendly and user friendly as well. Instead of using /properties.php?state=FL&cno=086&city=Miami to link to your page for property in Miami, FL, use this: /US/Florida/Miami/
3. The listing slugs should also be changed from /details/1848858/ to something more descriptive like: /US/Florida/Miami/1848858/ or: /US/Florida/Miami/8911-N-Bayshore-Drive/
[NOTE: Most of the category slugs are not ranking at all in google right now because they are not SE friendly]
Page structure
I’ve written about page structure before. The site is getting no SEO power right now. But with some simple changes to the headings, titles and descriptions, everything can be fixed.
1. There is an H1 heading of “Property.com” on all pages on the site. Most likely the SE’s are not giving any weight to this heading on the inner pages of the site. Instead, use an H3 of Property.com on every page and then on each listing page use an H1 of the category such as “Property for sale in Miami, FL” and then an H2 of the listing title such as “8911 N. Bayshore Drive - Miami, FL”. This tells the SE’s that your single listing page is about property for sale, in Miami, FL and what the address is. And with the H1 of “Property for sale in Miami, FL” on many listing pages (but not the whole site) it tells the SE’s that your site has relevance for “Property for sale in Miami, FL”. Neat heh?
2. The page title tags should be changed from “8911 N. Bayshore Drive - Miami, FL Property For Sale - Property.com” to something more user friendly and SE friendly such as: “Property for sale in Maimi, FL - 8911 N. Bayshore Drive”
3. The meta-description tag is the same for all the listings: “Add your property for free on Property.com. Find real estate properties for sale at Property.com”. Whoops! I’d recommend changing it to something unique to each listing page, and also something informative for the visitors. The first 120 characters of the listing description is a good choice because it has relevance to the listing page content and also gives the SE visitors an enticement to click the link when looking at all the other SE results on the page.
[NOTE: To see how mangled the titles and descriptions are in google, try this google search and look at the listings about half way down the page]
Internal linking
As noted above, the category and listing pages do not have SE friendly slugs, so the internal linking of Property.com is not as strong as it could be.
Once you’ve fixed the slugs, you should link to new slugs of /US/Florida/
/US/New-Hampshire/ etc from the bottom of your pages. For example, I’d add navigation at the bottom of all the listing pages for “Florida” with links to /US/Florida/ /US/Florida/Miami/ /US/Florida/Tampa/ etc. And I’d use anchor text of “More Florida Properties”, “More Miami Florida Properties”, “More Tampa Florida Properties” etc.
[NOTE: The homepage of Property.com shows 624,000 listings, yet google is only showing about 12,000 pages, so 600,000+ pages are missing. There is lots of room for improvement on the internal linking side of things!]
User experience
Finally, I can stop bitching about stuff!
1. The site navigation is sparse but it works. The “golden triangle” is being followed nicely.
2. The search features of the site are good. They’re pretty easy to use and there are several ways to access them. (It’s a good plan to give your visitors several ways to do the same thing)
The only user experience improvement that I would do is to add links to “popular searches” and “recently added listings” to the top of the page or the navigation. For a site like Property.com the visitors would be more likely to click and browse a lot more than use the search functions.
That’s all. Enjoy!
Share
Great analysis and excellent tips - many thanks Richard.
both are first page on Google when searching the term. none of them is doing too good when searching more than just one word…
@spinoza
Right, they rank #3 for the term “property”. Their domain is property.com and they have 12,000 pages with a title and H1 of “property” in them.
But like you pointed out, they rank for NOTHING ELSE. And the traffic guestimaters like alexa, compete, quantcast all show they are getting less traffic that this blog!
But with the simple stuff that I suggested in this post, they could rank for thousands of long tail terms and get 10 times the traffic they get now.
I appreciate your SEO-related posts, and am looking forward to your mini-site and geo-site series.
Regarding the duplicate content issue:
1. When fixed with a 301 redirect, roughly how long (days vs weeks vs months) does it take for the benefits to be seen in the SE’s?
2. Their ‘home’ link URL on the footer is property.com/index.php. Is the ‘index’ reference creating essentially 2 more pages of duplicate content, as seen by the SEs? Newbie question: If yes, can this issue be fixed with another 301 redirect of the ‘index’ pages (or, simply changing the footer URL to http://www.property.com)?
I ask, because I’ve committed the same errors.
Thanks,
Aaron
@aaron
1. The benefits will start as soon as google comes and does a ‘full crawl’ (views and indexes every page) of your site. If your site is not getting crawled daily or weekly, then get some new back links from ‘trusted sites’ or syndicate a blog post or article with a link to your home page and an internal page to get google’s attention for a re-visit.
2. You should always link your nav to your domain.com and not domain.com/index.php. You can just change this in your nav, you don’t need to 301 it. You should also use useful anchor text like “Property Home” instead of “Home” for your home page nav and you’ll get a very small SE boost from it. Every little bit helps.